Field Alpha was quiet except for the hum of Gwen's processor tower.
Luffy lay sprawled upside-down on an old couch, tossing a rubber ball into the air and catching it with one hand. Gwen, hunched over her desk, had three screens open and her goggles pushed up onto her head, hair a chaotic mess.
"We got lucky," Gwen muttered.
"That time? Or all the times?" Luffy asked.
She flicked one of her screens and zoomed in on a still image from a traffic cam — the outline of a figure flipping midair. Blurry, distorted, but still too close.
"This was two nights ago," she said. "One drone caught a flash of movement. Light didn't fully scramble. The EM field cut out mid-jump."
"And they didn't trace it back to us?"
"No. But someone could. One lucky enhancement, or a better camera angle? We're exposed."
Luffy sat up. "So we need to fix that."
"Yeah."
She brought up a new schematic: a modular distortion scrambler mounted into their masks. Dynamic field generation, short-burst cloaking, and adaptive blur against visual tracking. It looked half sci-fi, half miracle.
"This," Gwen said, "is what keeps us legends instead of fugitives."
The next few days blurred together as they worked nonstop.
Gwen repurposed parts from an old Oscorp display lens and combined them with micro-filters stolen from a discarded StarkTech smartwatch. The new unit projected a phase-disrupting distortion field just wide enough to confuse most commercial and police-grade optics.
Meanwhile, Luffy worked on refining his traversal. Not just swinging or leaping — but landing silently, moving through the blind spots Gwen mapped out. He crashed through two crates and one roof vent in the process.
"Your resilience is getting scary," Gwen said during a break. "You fell fifteen feet straight through sheet metal."
Luffy grinned. "Didn't even feel it."
"I think your fruit's evolving. You're starting to bounce back even when you don't mean to."
He poked at his shoulder. "I'm like a walking trampoline now."
That weekend, they ran their first controlled test.
Target: a rooftop with four street-level cameras and a patrolling drone. Gwen activated her suit's mask overlay and distortion field. As she crossed the roofline, the cameras blinked — a haze of static where she should've been. On playback, it looked like heat shimmer.
Luffy followed moments later, launching off a fire escape, landing in a perfect roll. The drone turned — but Gwen's signal scrambler looped the video. The system saw nothing.
They rendezvoused on the next building.
"You got it?" Gwen asked, panting.
Luffy smirked and held up a flash drive. "Drone footage. We're ghosts."
Gwen let out a slow, exhilarated breath. "Ghost-Spider and Strawhat — truly invisible."
Meanwhile, in a dim room inside the precinct, Captain George Stacy sat with his sleeves rolled and a cup of cold coffee beside him.
He watched a different clip: the same rooftop. At first glance, there was nothing. But on frame-by-frame review, a flicker of motion distorted the skyline. Something unnatural.
He scribbled notes into a leather-bound notebook: "Same time as last incident. Similar blur. Multiple witnesses report faint sounds but no visuals. Definitely coordinated."
He stared at the paused frame.
"You're real," he said quietly. "And you're good."
He didn't tell anyone. They'd only laugh again. No one else believed in New York's supposed vigilantes. But George had seen enough strange cases to trust his gut. And it told him this wasn't random.
He flipped to a pinned map on his corkboard. Red string connected five incidents across the city — all quiet, no casualties, minimal damage. All solved in ways the department couldn't explain.
He circled the last one. "No masks. No message. Just silence."
Back at Field Alpha, Gwen paced while Luffy rested.
"We're almost untouchable now," she said. "Cameras can't catch us. Mics distort us. Heat scans lag."
Luffy nodded. "You know what that means?"
She turned to him.
"We get to choose when the city sees us — and when it doesn't."
Gwen let that sink in. It wasn't about hiding forever. It was about control.
She reached for the whiteboard and added a new section: Field Ops Tier I — Full Stealth
Underneath, she wrote:
Distortion Mask: ✅
Thermal Blur Field: ✅
Audio Desync Pulse: ✅
Visual Loop Capture: ✅
Luffy tossed her a protein bar. "Congratulations, genius. You just made us legends."
She caught it with a grin. "Let's hope we stay that way."